Consideration Post 3

Exclusion Within Tik Tok Videos

Tik Tok and Instagram are social media platforms that rely on the senses of sight to watch/view content, hearing to listen to what is said or an audio, and touch to scroll or like for its expected use. So what happens when you cannot see or you cannot hear, but you still want to use these apps?

My campaign will primarily be taking place on Tik Tok and Instagram. I will be posting a series of videos and photos on the apps. Each Tiktok will include a main video with captioning and an audio. People who cannot see whether it be a temporary disability or permanent blindness, cannot scroll through Tik Tok and understand what is on the screen without additional audio features. If any of my viewers cannot hear, they will not be able to listen to the audio. For Instagram, I will be primarily posting reels of what I have already posted on Tik Tok and digital ads featuring a photo and a small caption. Similarly to Tik Tok, any Instagram users who cannot hear or see will struggle to fully experience my campaign unless there are features to support their needs. Fortunately, there are!

A More Inclusive Way

Tik Tok advocates for people with disabilities or specific needs. I learned a lot about this through their accessibility site. For the visually impaired, blind community, or people who have a temporary seeing impairment like lasik , there is a text-to-speech feature. Typed text can be converted to a voice-over. Pete Gustin, a blind Tik Tok user walks us through these steps and shares his experience using this feature. Users with sensitivity issues can also use the animated thumbnail feature. The hearing impaired, deaf community, or people who have a temporary hearing impairment like being in a loud room can benefit from Tik Tok’s auto captions. Spoken audio can be turned into text captioning.A light blue background with a black phone are shown. A circle is a bit forward from the phone and reads, "hello world". It is displaying the text to speech option for users. 

Instagram seems to be well informed on accessibility and driven to better their app for it. For videos there are auto-generated captions which turn sounds into captions for people who are not able to hear. Additionally, they offer captioning in many languages and are still adding more. They created captioned stickers on stories and reels for video stories and reels with sound that needs to be transformed into text. For anyone with visual impairments, Instagram offers alt text descriptions where an image can be described in great detail. There is a downside to that feature. If your average user does not write an alt text caption, a person with seeing impairments will not be able to know what the image is. 5 Ways to Make Your Instagram Account More Accessible Right Now. Pictured is the step by step process of creating alt text on the app. It is indicated with blue arrows.

I am going to utilize text descriptions and captioning as much as I can on Tik Tok and Instagram. Luckily, users can decide for themselves how they want most of their setting. With that being said, it is still my duty to make my posts as accessible as possible. Specifically for Instagram, I am going to utilize their alt text feature on every photo. 

Reaching the Audience

My project will reach people through social media. Tik Tok is the best way to spread content fast. I am hoping that this is how a younger audience catches word of my project. Since my campaign has many advertisement pieces, both digital and print, that will be another path to reach audiences. I am creating a billboard ad which will attract drivers and poster ads which can be placed near grocery stores to bring in shoppers. I am updating the actual Lemon Perfect marketing team with my journey so they can also help spread the word within the industry.